


A New Beginning

by ssrhpurgatory



Series: Dear Listeners AU [1]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: (They're definitely in a relationship and are in denial), (sort of), Death isn’t permanent, F/M, Fake Dating, So now it’s time for a new beginning, Thanks to the Dear Listeners
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2020-09-01 04:50:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20252476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory
Summary: Alexander Hilbert died.But at Wolf 359, death isn’t as permanent as it ought to be. Not for him, and, to his surprise, not for an old friend who died two decades ago. Or at least, not when there’s a handy backup available...(The opening fic for a particularly self-indulgent AU.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [No Going Back](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19979005) by [ssrhpurgatory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory). 

There was a bright flash, and a sound so loud that it was felt rather than heard. 

Alexander Hilbert had expected pain. And perhaps there had been pain, but if so, it was so overwhelming that he could feel nothing at all. 

And then everything else became nothing. 

And then, there was a light. 

Alexander Hilbert opened his eyes, squinting. Something was wrong. It took him some minutes to figure out what it was, and then he felt it; the pull of gravity, pressing him to the surface he was laying on. 

He blinked, and pushed himself upright, made awkward by the unfamiliar feeling of navigating in gravity. The room around him was blurry, dark objects around the perimeter. He had been expecting a hospital room, but this did not seem to be one. If he had to guess, he would say it was a bedroom; the surface below him seemed to be a bed. 

“What happened? Where am I?” He did not expect an answer, so he was surprised when he saw movement from one of the dark shapes along the wall and heard an almost-familiar female voice answer him. 

“Not entirely certain, but I suspect you died,” the voice said cheerfully. “As for where you are… well, I’m still trying to figure that one out myself.” The shape detached itself from the wall, and walked towards him. “I’m pretty sure it’s not the afterlife, though. Because if it is, it seems rather unfair that one still has to breathe and eat and defecate in the afterlife.” 

“Who are you?” Alexander asked, frowning. 

“I’m not really sure about that, either,” said the voice, holding something out to him. “Here. I think this will help.” 

Alexander reached out and took what the owner of the voice was holding out to him. A pair of glasses. He put them on, and was not entirely surprised when the dark shape resolved itself into a short, round, Black woman. 

She offered up a hesitant smile. 

“Rosemary.” 

A little frown creased the woman’s brow. “Not exactly. I seem to be just as much Eris as Rosemary these days.” 

“How…?” Alexander frowned, and then shook his head, laughing. “Of course. Box 953.” 

“I think so, yes.” She tilted her head to one side, considering him. “I understand you’re going by Alexander Hilbert these days.” 

“Yes.” 

“I think I could get used to calling you Alexander.” 

“And what should I call you?” 

The woman shrugged. “I haven’t quite decided what name fits this new me best. There have been a lot of changes, since last you knew me.” 

“Well, it is not as if I have not undergone changes myself.” Alexander looked down at his hands, frowning at the hollows, the age spots. “Perhaps I should just call you _suka_. Or are you no longer a bitch?” 

The woman smiled, a bright, familiar smile. “Oh, you know I always have been.” 

Alexander smiled back, reaching out a hand and taking hers, pulling her closer to the bed. “Well, _suka moya_, what comes next?” 

Her smile grew broader, turning into a laugh, and she squeezed his hand gently. “I don’t know. Would you like to find out together?” 

“Always.” 


	2. Chapter 2

Coming across a person here who looked exactly like Doug Eiffel had startled Alexander the first time it had happened. Eris—Rosemary—whoever she was—had dismissed his shock at the sight of the Eiffel lookalike with a wave and the words “That’s just Bob,” but the man’s voice had been Officer Eiffel’s and the man’s words had been very like Eiffel’s as well, and just as incomprehensible. Fortunately, Rosemary—he had decided to call her Rosemary for now, to make things simpler—seemed to have a better grasp of what Bob was talking about.

“My understanding’s not perfect, unfortunately,” she said a few days later, after a conversation with Bob that Alexander had only caught half of. “But I think they’re working on a copy of the Sol for us.”

Alexander made a choking noise. He had never been aboard it, but only one ship in Goddard’s fleet bore that name: Pryce and Cutter’s personal ship, which was always packed with the latest and greatest to come out of the Goddard Futuristics engineering department. “The Sol? But...”

“They came here.”

“When...?”

“After you died.”

Alexander swallowed hard. “What happened?”

But Rosemary only shook her head. “I’m not entirely sure. I know Marcus Cutter is dead. I think Warren Kepler might be, too.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s just a guess. Bob showed me...” She trailed off, and a pained expression flitted across her face. “Well, anyway. It will be easier if it’s just you and me going back to Earth.”

He found himself unable to disagree with her. “Do you know anything about the others? My...” he felt his voice choke in his throat and pushed past it. “My crew mates?”

“Isabel Lovelace made it back to Earth,” Rosemary said firmly, as if certain of it. “Renée Minkowski too, and... and Doug Eiffel.” There was a hesitance to Rosemary’s voice as she mentioned Officer Eiffel that made Alexander wonder, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask why, so he asked his other question instead.

“How do you know?”

“Isabel is one of them.” She jerked her thumb towards the hatchway that Bob had just exited through.

Alexander frowned. Bob bore a distressing similarity in looks and speech patterns to Officer Eiffel, but after the second or third encounter, it had become extremely clear that Bob’s similarities to Eiffel were only superficial. But Isabel... “I would stake my life on that being Isabel Lovelace,” he said in a low, hoarse voice. “She could not have been...”

Rosemary gave him an amused look. “You’re forgetting something. You’re one of them now too.”

Alexander gaped at her. It was true, he had forgotten. He had forgotten because he was himself.

Wasn’t he?

Rosemary patted him gently on the shoulder. “It was easy for me, but, well... Life after death isn’t such a foreign concept for me now.” She bit her lower lip, considering. “But Eris had a hard time of it, in her early days. Right after Pryce fed her Rosemary’s brain scan...”

Alexander shuddered. “I cannot imagine. The state Rosemary was in...”

Rosemary’s eyes met his, caught his gaze before he could look away. “She knew she was dying when that scan was taken. It was the being brought back to life in that particular way that was a little bit startling.” She chuckled. “And she enjoyed it, you know. Being able to make people get over their disagreements by brute force was very satisfying.”

“Eris threatened to erase my mind once.” The memory, which had gone hazy with time, sprang back to the forefront of his mind once more.

“I know.” Rosemary’s eyes were sparkling with amusement. “I remember when her remains were reintegrated into the rest of us.”

Alexander shuddered again. Not just to die and be reborn as an AI, but also to be split into pieces, to be killed again and again... No. “I do not understand how you can be so... so calm about such things.”

Her usual smile became strained. “I get the impression I’m just the latest iteration these folks have created, too,” she said softly. “I don’t know that they’d quite tried to give a body to anything like me before. And...” she put her hand to her head to touch the short crop of curls there that shone very white against her brown skin. “I’m not sure they would have made me old enough to match you if there hadn’t been a previous me asking them to.”

His heart made a strange thump in his chest at that, and he had to look away from her, had to draw a deep breath to calm himself. Old enough to match him.

Why would she have wanted to be old enough to match him?

Why did he care?

Oh, he knew why he cared. He had said as much when he had first seen her, if not explicitly. Had called her his, even if it had been attached to an insult, had told her he would always wish to find out what happened next from a place at her side.

There had been no indication over these few weeks they had spent in this place that she felt the same way, so he had shoved that feeling down, had tried to ignore the fact that it existed. But if she—if some former incarnation of her—had wanted to match him...

“You’ve gone very quiet,” she said, setting her hand cautiously against his arm.

“Just thinking.” He looked back at her and she started and blushed, pulling her hand back from his arm.

“Oh. Well.” It was her turn to be unable to meet his gaze, he thought, as she cast about the room, obviously trying to find some new topic of conversation. “I doubt Cutter would be as well managed, either, if this were the first iteration of me they’d tried,” she added.

Alexander had been reaching for her, planning to try... he didn’t know what. Something. But those words made him hesitate. “Cutter?”

She glanced back his way and tapped two fingers against her temple. “He’s up here too, or at least the version of him who was part of the Eris program. They didn’t seem able to... to properly separate the two. He was coded in deep. At the root level.”

“And now?”

Rosemary let out a pained little laugh. “And now I seem to be able to keep him in a box when I don’t need him. But some of my own instincts...” she sighed.

“You were always very like him, suka.” And Rosemary truly had been, even if those instincts had been tempered by a fierce protectiveness where her labs and the scientists she managed were concerned. “You needed to be.”

“I just worry that more of him is slipping out without me noticing.”

“I will notice for you,” Alexander promised. A rash promise, made without thinking.

Her eyes widened, and as he reached for her once more she took a step back from him, smiling awkwardly. “There’s no need for that. I’m managing just fine on my own.”

And then she turned and fled the room, and he did not know this place well enough to dare try to follow.

Alexander tried to sleep once she was gone, but it seemed impossible. An hour, he thought, perhaps a little longer, and he was awake again. Not refreshed, not well-rested, but awake.

There was a knock at his bedroom door, and his heart fell when it turned out to only be Bob.

“It’s time to go.”

“Go where?”

Bob grinned. “Home.”

“Then we truly are returning to Earth?” Alexander darted out into the corridor and followed along in Bob’s wake.

“Humanity has agreed to the process. You will be part of it.”

It was the most coherent thing that Alexander had heard Bob say since he had first encountered the other man. “And the process is…?”

“You already understand.”

He didn’t, but that answer gave him the impression that Bob was unlikely to answer any variation on that question. Still, he had to try. “What is my part in the process?”

“Humanity has to exist to take part in the process. You are returning to remove a threat to the future existence of humanity.”

A response that made as little sense as the previous one Bob had given him. Unless… but no. He had destroyed those samples after his first mission aboard the Hephaestus. He was sure of it. Decima’s final mutation during that mission, as it had leapt from Lambert to Hui, from Hui to Fourier…

He had to be sure. “Decima. You are sending me back to… to destroy Decima.”

“You understand.”

Alexander’s breath stopped in his throat.

And then, they entered onto what seemed to be an observation deck, and his horror released itself in a gasp of wonder.

“Is this a space dock?” Alexander had assumed this entire time that he was planet-side, somewhere with a gravity close to Earth norm. But if he was not... if he was not, then either this structure was truly massive for him to not notice the curvature necessary for a space station that rotated to create its gravity, or there was artificial gravity in this place generated by some unknown means.

As he looked out into the massive hangar bay in which the Sol hung suspended in empty air, only accessible by walkways, he began to suspect that it was the latter.

Well. These beings could change a red dwarf into a blue giant. Gravity manipulation was most likely simple for them.

“Yes, it is.” Rosemary appeared at his side, tucking her arm through his. A quick glance around revealed that Bob had left the room while Alexander had been entranced by the view the window out into the hangar offered them. “Though I haven’t gotten a straight answer from them about whether there are other species here, or whether they whipped it together just for us.”

Alexander found himself utterly distracted. Distracted by the warmth of her body along his side, by her fingers resting lightly against the side of his forearm. “Does it matter?”

“In terms of economies of scale, almost certainly,” Rosemary responded tartly. “If they can pull something like this off for two people without straining their resources...”

That got his attention. “Ah, but then there is the question of whether or not this is real.”

She gave him a sour look. She had obviously considered that, and had not liked thinking about it at all, her displeasure writ large across her face. And then, she pinched him.

“Ow!”

“Real enough.”

“Suka,” he grumbled, and then tucked her more firmly against his side when she went to pull away. She sighed and leaned her head against his shoulder.

“I’d like to think that this is real. I’d like to think that I can tell now,” she said quietly. “But I also know well enough how easy it is to trick a human brain or a clever bit of programming into thinking exactly what you want them to think.”

“It is time.” Bob’s voice came from behind and they both started, standing up straight. Rosemary freed her arm from his and brushed her hands nervously down the front of the flight suit she was wearing, one that matched his own, so different from the bright colors she had once worn, both as Rosemary and Eris.

Boarding the Sol was a delicate procedure; the gravity disappeared with a suddenness that was startling halfway down the enclosed walkway to the ship, and although Eris had never had trouble maneuvering in microgravity during the time Alexander had spent hooked up to Box 953, she had also never had a real body to contend with. Rosemary bobbed along like an awkward balloon, swearing quietly when she caught her elbow on a handhold and looking distinctly nauseated all the while. The look of relief on her face when they were both strapped in to chairs on the bridge and, following a distant thunk that Alexander assumed was the sound of the walkway retracting, when the Sol started the rotation that provided the ship with a weak form of gravity... well, Alexander found himself hard pressed not to laugh.

Sudden, swift acceleration made it impossible to get enough air in his lungs to get such a laugh out, in any case. The Sol seemed to have some sort of preprogrammed flight path, and a most alarming one—it headed out of the space dock and straight towards a star, moving so fast that Alexander had no time to react, no time to do anything—

Rosemary blinked blearily and shook her head to clear it. She hadn’t exactly been sure what to expect, but it hadn’t been whatever it was that had just happened. They had been flung at the star, and then... and then the star had changed around them, somehow, though she suspected she had blacked out part of the way through the transition. And now all that was visible out of the Sol’s viewport was a scattered field of familiar stars.

“Ugh.”

“Indeed.” At her side, Alexander was also blinking himself awake, looking groggy and distressed. He frowned and glanced at the instruments in front of him, and Rosemary did the same. If they were accurate, the Sol was on a sublight arc towards Earth, and would arrive in—

“Two weeks,” Rosemary said out loud, peering at the flight path. “Good lord, this ship is fast. I wonder if they made any modifications, or if this really is the current version of the Sol.”

“Do you know how long it has been?”

“Since?”

“Since my death.” Alexander’s voice had a ragged quality to it that she didn’t know how to respond to, so instead she just shrugged as well as she could around the straps that were holding her to the chair.

“The dear listeners don’t seem to keep track of that sort of thing. I’m not sure time actually means all that much to them.”

“Hm.” A frown creased Alexander’s forehead.

“You’re worried about something?”

He sighed. “My relationship with my crew mates was not... good. We were working together, but...”

“It was one of those enemy of my enemy sort of deals?” Rosemary laughed at Alexander’s stiff nod of acknowledgment. “Well, darling, I can hardly blame them.”

“I cannot either. But I wished to warn you—if we encounter them, that is—“

“If they’re anywhere near Goddard Futuristics, we’ll be encountering them, I’m afraid.”

Alexander’s jaw tensed. “Then they may attempt to kill me. Especially...” he trailed off, but Rosemary knew enough to finish the sentence.

“Especially your dear friend Isabel Lovelace?”

“Yes.”

“I see.” Rosemary bit her lower lip and considered. “And you were such good friends, once.”

Alexander gave her a sharp look, as if searching for some sign of sarcasm, but Rosemary was being sincere. When the incarnation of Eris who had been aboard Captain Lovelace’s mission had been reintegrated into the rest of them, she had carried that knowledge with her. Isabel Lovelace had really loved Elias Selberg, once upon a time.

And the man’s own actions had turned that love into hatred.

“Well, we’ll just have to see whether we can find some way to remind her that you’re human,” Rosemary said in a cheery voice, breaking the silence.

Alexander reached across the space between their two chairs to lay his hand over hers on the armrest. “I am not certain that she will ever see me as a human being again. And I am not certain it matters.”

“Of course it matters, darling.” And it would. If Isabel Lovelace were still so angry at Alexander that she attempted to harm him before he had a chance to do the work they were returning to complete...

A stab of guilt shot through her. If Decima had become a danger to humanity, then she—or at least the woman whose brain scan had become a part of Eris, the woman who she was now pretending to be—was at least partly to blame. Dmitri Vologin on his own might never have produced something that had the ability to wipe out humanity. But Dmitri Vologin given the resources of Goddard Futuristics and the support of one Rosemary Epps...

She had been too good at her job, that Rosemary. And she had been Goddard’s creature entire, willing to sacrifice herself for progress, in the end. A sacrifice that, from what she knew now, had not been in vain; Alexander’s work with Rosemary as she had died had lead him to this day.

Perhaps she shouldn’t call herself Rosemary now. It was strange, taking on the name of a woman who was twenty years dead, a woman who was only part of who she had become... but she didn’t know what else to call herself. She had been Eris, and whole, but whatever the Dear Listeners had done to her when they had given her this body had brought the scattered fragments of Rosemary to the fore, putting her in charge of the delicate balance of personalities that had existed in Eris. So she might as well be Rosemary.

Alexander had unbuckled himself and was moving around the cabin, examining different instruments. Rosemary watched him, trying not to smile and failing miserably. Oh, she was fond of this man.

As if he could feel her watching, Alexander glanced up and offered her a hesitant smile of his own. “I thought I would explore ship.”

“Does someone need to stay here and monitor all of these instruments?”

Alexander shook his head. “There appears to be some sort of primitive AI flying ship. It should be fine on its own.”

“All right.” Rosemary released herself to her harness and got to her feet. “Then would you like company?”

Saying that his face lit up would be an exaggeration, but a certain softness suffused his harsh features all the same, especially around the eyes. “Da.”

That look almost had her withdrawing her offer of company. That look was too much for her, the way she was now. But he was an intelligent man; if she withdrew from him now, he would eventually figure out why. “Where would you like to start?”

He shrugged. “Am interested in finding necessities for survival. After that...”

Rosemary breezed past him to the hatch that lead out into one of the main corridors. “After that?”

“After that we will see.”

The Sol was enormous. Large enough that Pryce and Cutter must have been able to each occupy their own distinct chunks of the ship without ever needing to encounter one another.

Rosemary wondered if she ought to suggest a similar arrangement to Alexander for the two weeks they would be aboard the ship. They easily could; there were cots throughout the ship, and a couple of sleeping cubbies in the mostly gravity-free central chamber that ran the length of the ship, but then... well, then there were the signs that Goddard’s enigmatic leaders hadn’t entirely lived separate lives.

Signs like the bedroom.

The bedroom with a massive four-poster bed in it.

A four-poster bed that had, upon further examination, restraints attached to the bedposts and a bedside table with drawers that contained all manner of—well. Rosemary had always been difficult to embarrass where sex was concerned, but somehow opening that top drawer and recognizing its contents for what they were when she had Alexander at her side was a whole other matter. Especially when it made her wonder what it would be like to share this bed—and the contents of those drawers—with him.

He had cleared his throat and had blushed bright red, turning his attention back to the bed. “The silk sheets are... nice,” he said in a strained voice.

Rosemary laughed, breaking through her awkwardness. “You’re welcome to them. I warn you, they’re not as much fun to sleep on as you’d expect. Your blankets always end up on the floor.”

Alexander raised an eyebrow at her, looking aloof and judgmental for a moment... and then a snort of laughter broke through and changed his face entirely. “I will take one of the cots, thank you.”

Still... the thought of sharing that bed with Alexander had given her an idea. A terrible, foolish idea, and one that might only lead to both of them getting hurt, but one that might work. “You mentioned being worried. About how your crew mates will receive you.”

He gave her a hesitant, startled look. “Da.”

“And you said that Isabel, in particular, doesn’t seem to see you as a person any more.”

There was a sudden tightness around the corners of his mouth, beneath his eyes. “Da.”

Rosemary bit her lower lip and considered her idea once more. It was still terrible, but... “Do you think that... well, I’m not quite certain how to put this. But if there was someone at your side who trusted you completely...”

Alexander frowned. “What are you trying to say?”

“I... if, say, you were married—“

Alexander emptied his lungs on a startled exhale. “Married?”

“Or, I don’t know, if we pretended to be engaged, or in a relationship of some sort...” Alexander was staring at her, wide-eyed, and Rosemary turned away, feeling her face flush. She might as well be embarrassed; she knew that it was a selfish suggestion, one that would get her some small part of what she wanted from this man, even if it wasn’t real. “Forget I said anything.”

“Do you think that you could pretend to feel that way? Well enough to fool other people?” His voice was hesitant, and she jerked her head back around to look at him, trying to read his expression and failing.

She lifted her chin in a challenge. “Could you?”

He studied her quietly for a moment. “I believe I could do a creditable job. With practice,” he added in a rush at the end.

“Then we should practice.” Rosemary glanced at the bed with its red silk sheets. “Just maybe not in here. That might be a little bit much for me.”

Alexander laughed again at that, and she joined him, trying hard to hide her anxiety.

What had she just gotten herself into?


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> fraught romantic nonsense with a side of pining between two people who should know better than to be Like That at their age but persist nonetheless

Rosemary got bored of poking through Pryce and Cutter’s bedroom in short order, and, when Alexander decided to stay behind for a moment, she wandered off down the hall with a laugh and a teasing suggestion that he try out the silk sheets. Alexander shut his eyes after she left and took a deep breath, pretending for a moment that he did not want to throw Rosemary down on that big bed with its red silk sheets. Throw her down and... and... he opened his eyes, startled.

Well, that was new.

He had become so used to the damage that his childhood had done to his body that he had not even noticed that it had been undone. Suddenly, every physical sensation was too much; he became distantly aware of his flight suit chafing, of the play of the air recycling against his skin, of the rough texture of his sleeve under his fingertips. All sensations that would have been too subtle for his nerve-damaged skin to detect before his rebirth at the hands of the Dear Listeners.

And then there was... that. He frowned down at his groin. No, definitely not a bodily reaction he was used to having to cope with. Morning wood had made the occasional appearance throughout his life—particularly in microgravity, where blood-flow was less restricted—but to get an erection simply because he had exchanged a few provocative words with another person? An unheard-of experience in his lifetime.

Of course, it hadn’t been just provocative words. It had been his thoughts as well, imagining... imagining that she might want him as much as he wanted her.

How long had he wanted her? How long had he repressed the thought of it? Certainly since her death, since the choice they had both made to see if Decima could save her life, the choice that had killed her faster than cancer ever would have. And before then...

Before then he had not had space for realizing he wanted her. It had only been when her loss was imminent that he had accepted some small part of what she meant to him.

And it was only now—when somehow, miraculously, she had been returned to him—that he realized that he wanted so much more. Not just sex, though from his body’s reaction to the thought of having sex with her, that urge was foremost in his mind. No, it was intimacy he was after. He wanted to be the person she turned to first, to be someone she could rely upon to meet her needs.

It had been a shock, her suggestion that they pretend to be married. A shock, because he craved that intimacy, and because it was unthinkable, unbearable that the only version of it he might get from her would be fake.

He took another deep breath and leaned against one of the bedposts for a moment, steadying himself. He would just have to find a way to convince her that he had something to offer her.

And perhaps, if he were very lucky, some day she might want him in return.

Rosemary had done her best to hide the fact that she had been running away when she had left Alexander in that bedroom, but she was fairly certain she hadn’t been nearly as subtle as she thought she was. With luck, Alexander would attribute her flight to embarrassment at making such a ridiculous suggestion, even if he had agreed to it in the end.

Without luck...

Without luck, the best she could hope for was confusion from the man when he discovered the torch Rosemary had held for him all those years ago and which even now seemed to burn bright in this person she had become at the hands of the Dear Listeners.

And the worst... at the worst, he would not even have confusion to offer her. The thought that he might be completely indifferent to her... no. Surely not that. She might have found him difficult to read from time to time over the years, but he felt something for her, she was sure of it. Whether that was friendship or just thecomfortable familiarity of a pair of coworkers who understood one another was yet to be seen.

_He saw through Rosemary once already_, her mind offered up. She shuddered, remembering that kiss, pressed awkward and unwilling to her mouth by a man desperate to win her over to his plan for her future, even if it had meant playing on her attraction for him. Remembered the argument they’d had after, when he had withdrawn any semblance of interest after she had laid out the real reasons she would make a truly remarkable test subject for Decima.

It had been an awful kiss.

They would have to do better if they wanted to convince anyone at all that they were actually a couple.

As if summoned by that thought, Alexander appeared at her side. He seemed withdrawn and thoughtful, remaining that way as they poked their noses into the next two rooms along the corridor—a lab of some sort and what appeared to be an interrogation room—though neither of them seemed to be in the mood to examine the contents of the rooms further. Not after what had happened in that bedroom.

Finally, Rosemary couldn’t stand their awkward avoidance of the subject any more. “We’ll have to do better than this, you know. That is, if you still want to—“

“I still want to,” Alexander said in a rush, cutting her off. “It is simply... I am not certain where to start.”

“Oh.” Rosemary wasn’t certain either, to be honest. She had spent her entire adult life doing her best to avoid just the sort of relationship she had proposed to Alexander that they fake, which had left her ill-equipped for the process of faking one. “I think... maybe we get used to touching? Like on the station, just before we left.”

“Ah.” Alexander smiled down at her, an expression that would barely count as a smile on anyone else, and tucked his arm through hers, tugging her closer to his side with the motion of it. “Like this, then.”

Rosemary nodded, suddenly too breathless to respond properly.

“What else?” Alexander had pulled her to a halt at the next door along the corridor and opened it onto what looked like a mess hall. No, not a mess hall, but a proper kitchen, and an incredibly swanky one too, complete with a wine cooler. Rosemary distracted herself by wondering if the Dear Listeners had managed to replicate the wine she could see inside to any degree of drinkability.

After all, this would all be so much easier to cope with if she were completely smashed.

“We should probably get used to showing affection in other ways, too,” she managed to say, using her distraction to prod her lungs into working properly once more. The only breaths she found herself able to take were shallow and swift. Oh, why was she finding this so difficult?

“Like this?” Alexander asked, and then there was the soft brush of his lips against her temple, and Rosemary’s breath was once again nowhere to be found. She felt him give a soft, hesitant nuzzle against the side of her face, and then his lips brushed against her again, high on her cheekbone, and again, against the upper curve of her ear.

A distraction. She needed a distraction, or she might never breathe again. “And I suppose there’s pet names, too,” she babbled, breath coming hard and fast as Alexander’s arm released hers and slid around her shoulders instead, pulling her gently against his side as his lips found her neck.

And then he pulled back from her, an anxious little frown on his face. “Am I doing this right?”

“I... well... I suppose that depends on what you’re trying to do.”

His face softened. “Show affection.”

Rosemary let out a laugh. “Well, yes, darling, you’re certainly doing that. Just perhaps a little bit more than you ought to show in public, hm?” She resorted to the distance of a teasing flirtation, reaching over to trail a finger down Alexander’s chest.

Of course, she hadn’t anticipated his reaction. His breath caught and his eyes darkened, and from the way he was looking at her Rosemary was suddenly extremely certain that he wasn’t indifferent to her at all. It might only be lust, that dark-eyed look, but that was better than nothing... and lust, she could work with.

“Rosemary hadn’t kissed anyone on the mouth since she was twenty,” she said out loud, turning further in his direction as she reached up to cup his cheek carefully in her hand, sliding her other arm around his waist. “Not on purpose, at least.”

“That explains a thing or two,” Alexander responded, his voice very deep and hoarse. He had leaned into her as she had turned towards him, his body an unfamiliar weight that she found comforting. “And now?”

“Now, I think we ought to test that oft-repeated maxim that practice makes perfect,” Rosemary said with a smile. She slid her hand around the back of his neck and pulled his mouth to hers, pleased when he came willingly.

This kiss was better than the last one they’d shared. It was almost impossible for it not to have been, of course, but even so...

Rosemary’s breath fluttered across his lips, soft and swift. She seemed to be nervous—had been, since he had pressed his lips to her temple. No, for longer than that; she had tensed and trembled against him at first when he had tucked his arm through hers, and he had almost pulled away.

But she had not trembled against him when he had pulled her against his side before. And they did need to accustom themselves to touching one another if this was going to work.

Her lips trembled too, despite the fact that it was the barest brush of a kiss. He pulled back from it and leaned his forehead against hers, a close, intimate gesture for all that she could not seem to bear to meet his eye. “Am I doing this right?” he asked for a second time.

Rosemary let out a little laugh. “Well, I think so, but kissing really isn’t my strong suit.” Her eyes flashed up and met his for a moment, darted away again. “It was much nicer than last time.”

Last time he had kissed her, it had been a kiss of desperation, an awkward, ugly thing planted on the mouth of a woman who had no use for him. Oh, she had accused him at the time of taking advantage of her physical attraction to him, but he had never truly believed she felt any such thing. And the rejection that had come after... was it any wonder that he had forced himself to excise his own attraction, to set it aside as meaning nothing?

But now he could act on it, if she would let him. He lifted his hand and cupped her cheek gently, rubbing his thumb along her cheekbone. “May I try again?”

Rosemary met his eye once more and nodded hesitantly. “I’m sorry I’m not very good at this.”

Alexander shook his head. “There is no reason to be sorry. We will practice.” He brushed his thumb gently against the corner of her mouth, and her lips parted on a small gasp.

He did not deserve this. Not after he had killed her, not after he had killed... He had killed, and that was the core of it. His actions had lead to the death of so many people over the years. He could not, in any good conscience, call himself a good man any more, if ever he had been one.

He had wanted to be good, once. Had wanted to bring light and life and freedom into the world, had wanted...

Had wanted this woman, here before him, whose actions were no less terrible than his own. Had wanted her, in part, because she knew and understood why he had done what he had. She had never had any illusions about who he was and what he would do to achieve his goal—had admitted to doing worse, in her time, even if he had outdone her once she was gone.

“It’s only… I know how to have sex with people. I just don’t know… this,” Rosemary said in a rush.

Alexander let out a snort of laughter. “Do you think I did not notice when you always sent your lovers packing five minutes after you were done?”

Her cheek heated under his hand, a warm blush spreading across her face. “I’m not sure that makes it better,” she muttered. “Bad enough that the walls in that apartment building were _paper_ thin…”

“We can take whatever time you need, suka.”

Rosemary rolled her eyes. “We can take two weeks, because that’s what we’ve got.”

Alexander took her by the chin and gently pressed upwards until she met his eye. “We can take what time you need. It will not be end of world if former crew mates decide they cannot trust me.”

“I just wish I were as sure of that as you are.”

And she was right. If, somehow, Marcus Cutter had gotten his hands on the strain of Decima that had killed Lieutenant Lambert and Dr. Hui, that had been such a terrifying fate that Dr. Fourier had… that Dr. Fourier had…

Best not to think of that. Best not to think that he had considered it himself, more than once.

Because right now, suddenly, miraculously, he had a future again, a hope of a happy ending that he had long since discarded as impossible and which he hardly even dared hope would be his even now.

And he was planning to fight for it.

Even if it meant destroying what remained of the retrovirus that had once been his life’s work.


	4. Chapter 4

Once upon a time, some twenty-five years or so before, Alexander Hilbert had been touch-starved and skittish, shying away from a pat on the hand, from a shoulder brushing against his as he worked side-by-side with someone else. Rosemary had brought the problem to William Carter—after all, it wouldn’t do for Alexander to behave like that if he wanted to go to space, where close quarters were the norm—and she had been given her marching orders: do what she did best, and manage that quirk out of the man, by hook or by crook, one casual touch at a time.

She had never confessed that command of Carter’s to him. Didn’t know if Alexander had any clue that she had gone out of her way to make him comfortable with small touches and soft guidance, with laughing conversations for the sake of conversing. Didn’t like to remember how it had become a slow torture for her, for that long-ago Rosemary, forcing herself into closeness with a man she had always been far too fond of, even before they had met.

That history between them, whether known to him or not, made it all the more strange to be on the other side of that interaction now. Now it was Alexander reaching for her, building an intimacy between them that would hopefully fool everyone else into believing them a couple. Of the two of them, Alexander was most definitely the one with more experience in the realm of relationships that were more than friendship and not just about fucking, so for all this had been her suggestion, he had realized in moments that he would have to take the lead.

This time, it was Rosemary who was scared and skittish, starved for touch that wasn’t an illusion of zeroes and ones. Starved for the physical, and afraid of it too. This body she inhabited now had become a foreign land to her, a prison she could no longer shape to her will.

A very pleasant prison in some ways, at least.

Alexander stopped nuzzling the nape of her neck, and Rosemary made a low sound of protest. She felt his lips curve into a smile against her as he pressed a kiss to the spot he had been nuzzling.

“In morning, suka. It has been very long day.” But his arm tightened around her waist, pulling her back against the comforting, bony warmth of his body, and that helped.

They were using the bed. Not those silk sheets—that had been too much for both of them, though Rosemary _had_ commandeered one of the pillowcases to make a hair wrap to sleep in—but they’d cobbled together an awkward, piecemeal set of bedding from the plain cotton sheets the cots used, all so that they could sleep together like this, cuddled up and still fully dressed. As a way to become comfortable with casual physical touch, she had put it, though truth be told...

Truth be told, she had just wanted it.

Truth be told, she just wanted _him_, far, far more than she should.

Rosemary had not slept in a bed with another person in her entire adult life. Had sex with someone else? Plenty of times. But just sleeping...

It was strangely comfortable.

Alexander began snoring.

Oh, Rosemary had missed that sound when it had been gone. Their bedrooms had shared a wall, in that old apartment complex on Goddard’s campus. A very thin wall.

His snoring had become company, back then. And now...

And now Rosemary drifted off to sleep, a smile on her face.

Alexander woke with his face buried against the back of Rosemary’s neck and his arm still wrapped tight around her middle.

Oh, and an erection.

He still was not used to that.

Granted, his other arm, which was still jammed between their bodies, should have gone completely numb by now and had not, and he was not used to that, either. He twisted his arm to make sure.

The fact that his palm wound up cupping Rosemary’s ass when he did surely had to be a coincidence.

She had always had a magnificent ass, and he had never once thought he would be put in a position to touch it. The fact that age had had its way with her the way it had with him—skin loose and sagging, muscles no longer as firm as they once had been—was no detriment now that he was in that position.

He found himself imagining, for a moment, that they had been allowed to grow old together. And he meant that together; he would have wanted to be by her side, in her bed.

Like this, if nothing else.

She shifted in his arms, and he pressed a kiss to the back of her neck, hot and needy.

Perhaps not _just_ like this.

Oh, he wanted her. He had wanted her for years, even if he had not realized it, and wanted her again. He wanted her in every way he could take her, every way she could give herself to him.

“Good morning,” she said in that low, raspy voice of hers.

Alexander let out a low hum and pressed another kiss to the back of Rosemary’s neck. “Good morning.”

Her body shifted against his, and he thrust against her unconsciously as he did.

“Oh,” she said, her voice soft and surprised even as her body tensed in his arms.

“Sorry. I... ah. This is new for me.” Alexander lifted his arm from her middle, intent on pulling away from her.

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing,” Rosemary replied, nestling her body back against his even as he tried to pull away. “I know what to do with that sort of thing. It’s everything else that’s difficult for me.”

The thought that she might be willing stopped his breath in his throat. “So... do you want...?”

“Do I want...?” Rosemary laughed. “You’ll have to be more specific, darling.”

“To have sex,” he clarified, still breathless, snugging his arm around her middle once more, suddenly aware of her body and how it fit against his in a way he had been avoiding.

“Yes,” she said softly. “But only because it’s familiar ground. I know what to do with someone who wants to have sex with me.” She shifted slightly in his arms, turning just enough to glance over her shoulder at him and meet his eye. “But I’m not sure it wouldn’t be counterproductive.”

Alexander winced, remembering those long ago lovers, flung from Rosemary’s presence once she was done with them. No, she was right. If he ever hoped to build any sort of true intimacy with her, he would need to take this in the right order. Would need to prove that he could be trusted with her mind and her heart before he asked her to trust him with her body. “You are correct,” he said gravely. He let out a sigh and twisted his hand away from where it was still quite perversely cupping her ass. “I do appreciate the offer,” he added.

Rosemary snorted. “You mean your cock appreciates the offer and is rather sad you didn’t take me up on it.”

Alexander let out an unwilling laugh of his own. “You are a ridiculous, provoking woman.”

“Always have been,” she said, laughter still on her lips and threatening to burst through. “But you should know that by now.”

At least this comfortable teasing was better than the previous day’s trembling reluctance. Or perhaps it had been fear. But for all that Alexander knew he had given her plenty of reasons to be afraid of him, she had never shown it before now. Instead she had once faced down his horrors and confessed horrors of her own.

Might as well confess the horror weighing heavily on his mind just at this moment.

“I killed you.”

This got him a startled, over-the shoulder look from Rosemary, who had relaxed her head back to her pillow. “I… Rosemary… she had terminal cancer, darling. Even Pryce’s best interventions could only keep her from that death for so long.”

“And would you have taken Decima if I had not offered it? If I had not begged you, thinking that I could... that I could...” the words choked themselves off in his throat.

“Rosemary might have.” Rosemary had gone stiff and cold in his arms, her face turned away once more, and those words made him stiffen as well, like a hound that had caught a scent he needed to chase.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You know she had to get Kerr’s permission to go ahead?” Alexander nodded against the back of her neck, feeling a sick premonition about the matter, and Rosemary continued. “Well, he’d already considered it. Hell, so had she. I don’t doubt he would have suggested it himself, if you hadn’t beaten him to it.”

Alexander let out a startled puff of breath. “Rosemary...”

“And she would have gone along with it then, too.” She sighed. “She was so desperate for her death to mean something. You know she was. It felt so pointless, otherwise. But she never wanted to leave you thinking that you could have saved her, if only...”

He shut her up with a fierce hug, startling the rest of the air out of her lungs, and lifted his head to whisper into her ear. “Whether it was my request or Kerr’s command that you followed, I would have thought that,” he said, pressing a fierce and utterly possessive kiss to her cheek. “My hope only died when you did.”

“You poor boy.” A thread of dismayed humor snuck its way into Rosemary’s voice. “We used you roughly, didn’t we.” It was not a question, but a statement of fact.

Alexander still felt like he needed to answer it. “I needed to lose my hope to survive in that place. You safeguarded the last of it.”

Oh, that had been too close. Too close to a confession of what he actually felt, what he actually wanted from her. Too much for her as well, he suspected; she tugged his arm off her body and slid away from him. “I’m going to go take a shower and get ready for the day.”

Alexander let her go.

Rosemary turned the shower up as hot as it would go and stepped into the stream of water. She felt dirty, like she needed to scour her skin off. It wasn’t a nice feeling.

Rosemary. She kept calling herself that, but she wasn’t really that woman, not in the slightest. And she would have to explain it to Alexander, explain it until he understood, because he still seemed to think she was the woman whose face she was hiding behind, a woman whose only earthly remains could be found in the scattered fragments of consciousness that rode the vast tangle of minds that had become part of Eris over time.

But she was not Rosemary Epps, and she never had been.

The hot water gave out long before she was ready for it to, and she emerged from the shower reluctantly, getting dressed in another one of the drab navy flight suits the Dear Listeners had provided both her and Alexander with. She had wanted civilian clothing, but hadn’t known how to ask for it, so she had taken the flight suits and had tried to be happy about it. At least she was covered. Maybe the rest of those silk sheets would make a good dress. Not that she wanted to sew silk by hand, but it would be better than the flight suits.

She found Alexander in the kitchen. Found him cooking, which was startling in and of itself, and whatever meal it was that he had managed to assemble out of the supplies on the Sol smelled delicious.

“We need to talk.”

He glanced over his shoulder at her before turning back to the frying pan. “All right.”

“I’m not Rosemary.”

He turned the heating element he was cooking over off and turned to the counter next to it, scooping the contents of the frying pan evenly onto two plates. “You have said this before.” He set the frying pan down and picked up both plates. “Breakfast?”

“You didn’t kill me. You killed her.”

He set the plates down on the table and gave her a mild look. “Suka moya, we were both dead people. And yet, we are here, alive. So if I killed Rosemary, it was also you that I killed.”

She wanted to scream with frustration. “Dmitri—“

He held his hand up to silence her. “If I am still Dmitri Vologin, you can still be Rosemary Epps,” he said, his voice quiet and very intent. “I have lived a half-dozen different lives since I was last that man. Have gone through many changes, just as you have.”

She fell silent, not knowing how to answer back to that.

“Come,” he said, a little smile on his face as he pulled out a chair for her. “Eat.”

Rosemary sat in the proffered chair, a frown on her face. “All right. But we’re discussing this later.”

“If we must.” And then Alexander bent over and pressed a kiss to the back of her neck, and all of her annoyance disappeared, her mind going soft and fuzzy. “But I can find very little difference between you and the Rosemary I knew,” he whispered against her ear.

Rosemary blushed.

Wasn’t this man going to be trouble.


	5. Chapter 5

Their two week journey back to Earth passed far too swiftly. They would be entering Earth’s orbit in less than a day, and the Sol had begun bleeding momentum in preparation for coming out of the sublight arc, the constant gravitational shifts leaving Alexander feeling more than a little spacesick. But at least he was not as bad as Rosemary, who had vomited up every meal she had attempted to eat or drink in the past 24 hours and who had, finally, reluctantly, accepted his offer of a saline drip.

“I just hate having tubes going into me,” she said quietly as he was administering it.

“I know, suka.” He made sure the drip was flowing properly before settling on the bed at her side.

At least there was this to say for the past two weeks: she no longer shied away from him when he reached for her. Instead, she nestled her body comfortably against his and relaxed, her breathing going soft and steady. After a moment, he realized she must have fallen asleep.

Alexander tilted his head carefully to study her face. To commit it to memory, as he had every day for the past two weeks, studying her multivarious moods as intently as he ever had any of his research.

He had forgotten so much in the 20 years since she had died. Had forgotten the little dimple that sometimes appeared in her left cheek as she smiled, had forgotten the irritated scrunch of her brow when she was particularly annoyed by something, had forgotten that she was just as good at faking a smile that brought real warmth with it as she was at hiding her true emotional state.

And she was very, very good at hiding how she truly felt.

Not that Alexander had ever been very good at reading the emotional state of others. He had always overstepped, had always inspired anger and distaste where he had hoped for cooperation.

Was there hope, in the way she came to him now? Hope, in the way she had settled at his side, her head heavy against his shoulder, her trust apparent in the way she had fallen asleep in moments?

Or was he reading hope where there were only cold stratagems meant to present a certain face to the world?

That she wanted him safe, he was certain of. It was the why that nagged at him. Did she want him safe because she cared for him, or was his safety only important insofar as he was the person best suited to take apart the retrovirus he created?

After half an hour or so, the saline pouch had emptied itself. Alexander reached for the gauze and tape he had left nearby and extracted the needle from Rosemary’s arm, trying not to wake her as he did. He did not want her to wake up with the needle still in her if he could manage it, given her distaste. And given what she had gone through during the months leading up to her death, he could not blame her. Even if she had not volunteered for Decima… well, chemotherapy was a nasty business, and she had hated the PICC line that it necessitated with a passion.

Fortunately, it seemed she was too exhausted to wake, not stirring even when he transferred her head carefully from his shoulder to a pillow. He got up to dispose of the saline pouch, pausing for a moment to brush a kiss to her forehead.

He returned to the bedroom once the pouch was disposed of and settled in at Rosemary’s side once more, wrapping his arm around her midsection and cuddling close against her.

Alexander would have given quite a lot to have been allowed such latitude in his previous life. Perhaps he would not have become what he had become, if he had been given it.

He almost laughed at the thought. No, Goddard Futuristics, the constant pressure of Marcus Cutter and his vision for the future… that would have shaped Dmitri Vologin into the man Alexander Hilbert had become, Rosemary’s presence or no. And no doubt she would have been responsible for shaping him as well, had he achieved the closeness he found so appealing now.

She always had been Cutter’s bitch to control.

Perhaps she still was, even with the man dead and gone.

Rosemary woke up feeling truly manky, though less so than she had when she had fallen asleep. Alexander was snoring softly next to her, laying on his side, his face tucked against her neck and his arm wrapped around her middle. The saline pouch was gone and a folded square of gauze was taped in the crook of her elbow, and damn, if that level of consideration didn’t make her fall half in love with the man in an instant.

He shifted and let out a sound that was more snort than snore. “You are awake?” he murmured, pressing a kiss to her neck.

“Yes. Sorry if I woke you too.”

He yawned. “Was not asleep.”

“The surround sound snoring I was being treated to a moment ago says otherwise.”

He let out a little chuckle at that. “Perhaps a light doze.”

“Pretty sure there was rapid eye movement and everything.”

“Oh, be quiet, you ridiculous woman.” And he lifted his head from her shoulder and planted a kiss on her lips to silence her. Rosemary opened her lips as he teased them apart, luxuriating in the careful way he eased her deeper into the kiss.

It was true. She _was_ ridiculous. Ridiculous for allowing this, ridiculous for wanting him, ridiculous for proposing the ridiculous plan that had Alexander taking every opportunity to kiss and cuddle her and to make blatantly apparent his lust for her body. And perhaps she could cope with it, if he took it to its final conclusion. Perhaps she could cope with it, if he had even once taken her up when she had offered him sex. But instead, there was this carefully curated intimacy, these quiet moments full of seduction that never went beyond making her squirm.

She both hated and adored him for it.

He broke the kiss, looking intently down at her. “But you are feeling better?”

“Much,” she reassured him, reaching up to cup his cheek in her hand.

“Good.” He sat up and smiled down at her. “I suspect we will both need to be ready.”

Ready for what, he did not need to say. Their main topic of conversation over the past two weeks—aside from the semblance of an established relationship they had been trying to build—was what they would do when they returned to Earth. Rosemary’s only hope was that no one on Goddard Futuristic’s board of directors had been able to oust Adriane from the archives. She certainly had enough blackmail material to keep them all in hand, but as to whether she had actually managed it once it had come out that Cutter and Young and Kepler and Riemann had died at Wolf 359, that Pryce had lost her mind to a brainwipe… well, that Rosemary was less certain of.

Still, she had to hope.

“Do you know how long until we’re back in normal space?”

Alexander shook his head. “Soon, though.”

The anticipation left her itching beneath her skin, and as much as she would like to fall asleep again and snooze her way through the hours left until she could send a hail to Earth, she knew she would not be able to.

There was a sudden shift, the room almost seeming to ripple around them.

“Ah.” Alexander raised his nonexistent eyebrows. “We are returning to normal space now, apparently.”

“Thank god.” Rosemary sat up cautiously. Her stomach heaved, but fortunately there wasn’t anything left to come up. There was still the constant tug of deceleration, but it did not leave her feeling the same queasy distress as it had while they had still been in the sublight arc. “Want to help me toddle my way to communications?”

“You know me. Always happy to be of assistance.”

“You are.” And she put her hand to his chest and tugged him close, brushing an impulsive kiss against his lips.

He had a silly little smile on his face when she released him, and she almost regretted that impulse.

“Let’s get going,” she said, pushing him away with the hand she had tugged him close with.

He blinked myopically at her. “Right. Yes. Of course.” And then he slid off the bed and offered her his hand and there it was again, that feeling that she was more than half in love with this man and falling harder every day.

No. She was attracted to him, and more than that, he was her friend. But that wasn’t the same thing as love. Lust, maybe. But not love.

She didn’t have it in her to love anyone, anyway. And it would be useless to expect someone to love her back, not when she was still confused about who she was.

So time to concentrate on what she could do.

The hail to Goddard Futuristic’s private relay connected in an instant. Apparently no one had thought to deactivate the Sol’s priority access to the system. Perhaps no one had remembered it existed, but it was sloppy of them not to have. And from there, it was the work of an instant to dial the archives.

The phone rang, once, twice, three times. Rosemary had not remembered to check the local time on Earth before placing the call, but Adriane was never far from her office.

If Adriane was still alive, that was.

There was a click. “Dolmetsch.”

Rosemary almost sobbed with relief. Oh, it was good to hear her friend’s voice.

“Hello?” Adriane’s measured voice echoed its way out of the speakers on the comms console.

“Adriane.”

“Who is this?” There was a hint of confusion in Adriane’s voice, and it made Rosemary want to laugh.

“Adriane. Mein Herz, mein Schatz, mein Liebchen. It is _so_ good to hear your voice again.”

Adriane’s voice caught, a sharp little inhalation of breath that hitched in the middle of the next word out of her mouth. “Rosmarin?”

“An approximation only, I’m afraid.”

There was another hitch of breath from Adriane’s end, and a low sob that startled Rosemary, but the next words out of her mouth were practical. “I just received a report that the Sol had been spotted at the edge of Earth’s sensor array.”

“That would be us.”

“Us?”

“I’ve got Marya with me.”

Another strangely sob-like breath from Adriane. “Good. He will be useful.”

“Any chance of us getting back to Earth without an intercept from the board?”

“Give me ten minutes.”

There was a click, and the line went on hold. Rosemary ignored the sullen silence from Alexander, who had been standing by her shoulder during the exchange.

“And you claim to not be Rosemary Epps,” he muttered.

“I’m not.”

“You are the only person who is capable of charming even Adriane into compliance, suka.”

Rosemary snorted. “Well, that’s nonsense. She’d do anything for Pryce, you know.”

“Perhaps.” And his voice was just as sullen as that silence had been.

Rosemary turned to glare up at him from her perch on the comms console’s chair. “Do you have something you want to say, darling?”

He sighed. “No. I simply…” Alexander trailed off, and then let out a low growl, bending over her to nip lightly at the side of her neck. “There is no call for me to be possessive,” he muttered against her ear, “but I find myself unaccountably so.”

“She’s my oldest friend.”

“And I know it,” he said, before nipping her again, a fierce little scrape of his teeth followed by a kiss meant to comfort. “Simply allow me to be cranky about it, hm? I will be over it soon.”

They would have to talk about that. But not right now—there was a click, and Adriane was back on the line.

“You have clearance to dock at the Canaveral space elevator. Lieutenant Herrera will take things from there.”

Rosemary winced. “Does it have to be her?”

“She has been very useful to us, Rosmarin.” Adriane’s dry voice came through with just a hint of censure, and Rosemary winced again. “Stay safe.”

The line went dead.


	6. Chapter 6

“I can’t _believe_ she recruited Rosemary’s granddaughter,” Rosemary muttered indignantly as she closed out the comms channel.

Alexander suppressed a snort. “To be fair, the Special Intelligence division recruited her first,” he pointed out. “If Adriane has turned Lieutenant Herrera against their interests, it would be quite a feat.”

“Assuming this _is _against the interests of Special Intelligence.” Rosemary frowned. “I’m too many damn years out of date to feel comfortable with this.”

“But you trust Adriane.”

The frown disappeared, and Rosemary met his eyes, nodding her certainty. “With my life. And yours.”

“Then let us trust Adriane.”

A grimace played across Rosemary’s face. “Fine. But I still think it’s risky using _her_ for this.”

“She was very kind, the time I met her.” Lieutenant Herrera had been part of Kepler’s team when he had come to the Hephaestus after Alexander’s first rotation aboard the station, and she had, quite literally, saved Alexander’s life, in more ways than one. “If Adriane believes her trustworthy, so do I.”

Rosemary made another face. “Well, that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

Alexander tried not to laugh.

Against all expectation, they docked at the elevator station without challenge. It felt too easy to Alexander, but he had no way of knowing what obfuscations Adriane was running on her end of things to mask their arrival. And the docking port they were cleared to dock at was small and out of the way, definitely not where the Sol would usually attach to the Canaveral station.

The airlock was opened by Lieutenant Herrera, a large Latina woman with close-cropped brown curls who was wearing a flight suit that looked as if it had been ironed to perfection only moments before. She acknowledged them both with a nod, her eyes fixed to a point above both of their heads, and directed them on their way in a low, raspy voice that was very much like her grandmother’s. They followed her down the hall and through an access hatch into a maintenance corridor.

“Down to the end, take a left, and that will get you to the maintenance access hatch for the elevator,” she told them. “It leaves in two hours. Get yourself settled, keep quiet, and I’ll meet you there when it’s ready to depart.”

“And what _exactly_ will you be doing until then?” Rosemary asked irritably.

Lieutenant Herrera quirked a dangerous eyebrow up and looked directly at Rosemary for the first time since they had disembarked, her expression echoing the one on Rosemary’s face, though Alexander doubted either woman was aware of the similarity. “Covering your goddamn tracks, old lady.” And then she shut the maintenance access hatch behind them and was gone.

Rosemary glared briefly at the hatch before starting down the hall in the direction Lieutenant Herrera had indicated. “I don’t trust that girl,” she muttered.

“Suka. Please. Do not antagonize her.”

“She’s up to something.”

“She is Special Intelligence. They are always up to something. Now hush.”

The maintenance compartment aboard the space elevator was spare and bare, just a handful of embedded consoles and well-padded crash seats, along with a few closed access hatches in the walls that no doubt lead to maintenance tunnels within the structure of the elevator. Alexander coaxed Rosemary down onto one of the chairs before settling himself in another. “Try to take a nap,” he suggested.

This only got him a glare.

She really was in fine form today, his Rosemary.

“Or I could find a different way for us to pass the time,” he murmured.

“What did you have in mind?” The glare had turned into a suspicious look, but a small smile was forcing its way into existence, turning the corner of her mouth up and unleashing a quite devastating dimple in her cheek.

“Come over here and find out,” he shot back, patting his lap.

“Oh, you tease,” she murmured, but shegot out of the chair and crossed the room to him anyway, settling down sideways across his lap and wrapping her arm around his shoulders. “Well, on with it then,” she said, leaning in close, her face a bare inch from his.

If she wanted to be kissed, she was about to be disappointed. Alexander tucked the weight of her body closer to his before sliding a hand up her spine and digging his fingers into her neck.

Rosemary slumped against him with a groan. “How did you know?”

He found a little point of tension at the base of her skull and dug his knuckles into it, getting a whimper from Rosemary. “You were squinting at the lights. Very cranky. Headache?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Probably still dehydrated. Not sure we can fix that at moment. But this should help.”

“Thank you.” She leaned her forehead against the side of his head and shut her eyes. A few minutes later, and she let out a soft snore. Alexander kept rubbing the back of her neck gently for a little longer, but it seemed that Rosemary was taking the nap he had suggested. He suspected that the increased gravity of the counterweight station was also having an effect on her; the gravity the Sol had been able to produce by spinning was nowhere near the close-to-1-g here on the station that anchored the other end of the Canaveral space elevator.

He was adjusting well enough himself, but he had been through this before. Rosemary had never been to space, not in any form but Box 953. Even with his careful description of the physical effects she might experience, she had not truly known what to expect, and was, he thought, rather annoyed by the fact that it was affecting her as much as it did.

She always had hated being ill.

Rosemary was still asleep in his lap when the hatch they had entered the elevator through opened, revealing Lieutenant Herrera. She raised an eyebrow at the sight of them, but did not comment.

“She will need water when she wakes up,” he whispered. “Or something with electrolytes, preferably.”

Lieutenant Herrera nodded and went for one of the hatches in the wall, which turned out to open on to a storage space. She dug around in it for a bit and found a pouch of clear liquid, bringing it over and clipping it to the side of Alexander’s chair. And then she paused for a moment, looking down at them both.

“Guess this explains the side-eye you gave me when we first met,” she said in a low voice. “Damn, but if it isn’t like looking in a funhouse mirror to my future.”

Alexander snorted. She _had _noticed that similarity, then. “You have her smile.”

“I wouldn’t know. She hasn’t smiled at me,” Lieutenant Herrera said drily. “You should wake her up and see if you can get those fluids in her now. Descent begins in half an hour.”

Rosemary woke with a crick in her neck and an imprint of the wrinkles in the shoulder of her flight suit on her cheek.

“Feeling better?” Alexander asked, dropping the hand that had carefully shaken her awake.

“Not really.”

“Here.” He held up a pouch of what looked like water, and she took it, popping out the straw embedded in the seal and washing out some of the manky taste in her mouth.

“I should probably get out of your lap.”

He wrapped his arms around her waist. “In a moment.”

“I’ve got to be crushing you, darling.”

“Circulatory system seems to be much more robust. I am fine.”

“Mm.” She let him tug her closer. “Where’s the girl?”

“She is almost 40, suka. I do not think you can call her a girl.”

“Where’s my granddaughter?”

Alexander lifted a hand and pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “She opened access hatch and said she would be back in five minutes.”

Rosemary peered over his shoulder with a frown. “Did she say what she was doing?”

“Rosemary.”

“I just…” But there were Lieutenant Herrera’s feet, emerging from the maintenance tunnel she had crawled off down. She shimmied herself down to the floor and reached back into the tunnel, pulling out… was that a duffle bag? “What’s that?”

Lieutenant Herrera shot Rosemary a distinctly amused look. “I don’t know. Adriane got someone on the ground to stow it before the elevator started its climb last night. Said it was for you two.”

Rosemary slid off of Alexander’s lap and shoved the pouch of water at his chest before bustling over to inspect the duffle herself. Not that she believed it really was from Adriane. “Well, open it up.”

Lieutenant Herrera seemed to be trying—and failing—to hide a smile, but she worked the zipper of the duffle on Rosemary’s behalf, exposing…

“Oh, bless you Adriane,” Rosemary said, reaching into the bag and pulling out a dress. It was a modern thing in a knit fabric, and it looked like it would just fit. Underneath were undergarments—nothing too fitted, simply a matter of elastic and cotton that would at least manage to hold her chest in place until she could find a suitable replacement—and under that was civilian clothing for Alexander as well.

“Better stow it for now,” Lieutenant Herrera said, and Rosemary reluctantly stuffed the dress back into the bag. “You’ll be more comfortable in the flight suit until we get past geosynch, especially for rotation, but once we hit Earth grav you guys get changed and we can slip you out with the civilians.”

“And then?”

“You’ll want to head to Dr. Pryce’s home. That’s where the others have been staying.” Lieutenant Herrera fondled the bag for a moment before finding a side zip. She pulled out two flat, stiff packets, the top one of which had an R inscribed on it in familiar handwriting. “I’m going to guess these are ID and currency for you two.”

Rosemary snatched the top packet and ripped it open. “Oh, good lord.” The photo on the driver’s license was the same one that had been on Rosemary’s work ID twenty years ago. “This makes me look like the sort of woman who can’t handle aging.”

“But it _does _look like you,” Lieutenant Herrera said, clearly trying not to laugh. She reached out and snatched the packet back, tucking both back in the duffle. “Go get buckled in, granny. Descent starts in fifteen.”

“Granny?” Rosemary stared at the younger woman, aghast.

Lieutenant Herrera raised her eyebrows, still amused. “What, like you aren’t?”

“Oh, _fuck off_,” Rosemary muttered, turning her back on the woman as Lieutenant Herrera started strapping the bag to a wall and returning to the seat next to his that Alexander had settled her in when they had first boarded the elevator.

Alexander sighed.

“What?” she snapped, turning to glare at him.

Alexander bit the inside of his upper lip as if he were trying not to laugh. “She certainly is your granddaughter,” he said, pitching his voice low enough that Lieutenant Herrera wouldn’t be able to hear what he was saying unless she were deliberately listening in.

“And you can go fuck off too,” Rosemary said primly, fastening the final buckle on the seat and snuggling the straps tight.

“Not until we are planetside, suka,” Alexander growled, a noise that sent a shiver down Rosemary’s spine and a flush to her face. “And only if you come with me.”

“You two are completely feral,” Lieutenant Herrera said, buckling in to the seat on the other side of Alexander. “Could you keep the flirting down to socially acceptable levels, please? That’s my _grandmother_.”

It was Alexander’s turn to blush and Rosemary’s turn to try and hide her laugh.

Maybe she still couldn’t find any good reason to trust Lieutenant Herrera, but she rather suspected that by the time the space elevator touched down, she would have plenty of reasons to like the woman.

And even if they had never been family, perhaps, some day, they could be friends.

If only it were so easy to figure out what she wanted to be to Alexander.


End file.
